Why should they do something about it? They are not IT people. If you want to switch, do it today. Plenty of options exist.
If you designed yourself into a corner by utilizing function as a service to program agains ta proprietary API, then you can just as well start from scratch or quit and join a company that knows how to avoid lock-in.
This already happened. Hetzner, OVH, and countless other local cloud companies exist. It is only the path of least resistancd and market inertia, that stops companies from switching.
I run on Hetzner and am saving big bucks compared to the ridiculously high priced AWS.
> I run on Hetzner and am saving big bucks compared to the ridiculously high priced AWS.
IMO even Americans should take a look at whether they need to be using the big cloud providers or not. They're so much more expensive compared to smaller hosts like Hetzner, Digital Ocean, Vultr, and so on. It depends on what you're doing, of course, but I'm American and moved off of Azure last year due to the price and the complexity it encourages.
Reposting my comment from another thread on the same topic a few days ago:
> This is why I moved off of Azure and over to Hetzner's US VPS's. For what I was deploying (a few dozen websites, some relatively complex .NET web apps, some automated scripts, etc.), the pricing on Azure just wasn't competitive. But worse for me was the complexity; I found that using Azure encouraged me to introduce more and more complex deployment pipelines, when all I really needed was Build the container -> SCP it into a blue/green deployment scheme on a VPS -> flip a switch after testing it.
Comparing EU cloud providers to AWS is like comparing a 1963 Zastava to 2025 high end BYD because both of them are cars and can drive from point A to point B.
Well, if the Zastava had 5-10x the amount of horsepower and storage space of the BYD for the same amount of money. Because that’s what is often the reality. Bare metal is unreasonably efficient compared to cloud services for not that much more know-how.
I do tech DD work for investment funds etc and one thing I often see are slow, complex and expensive AWS-heavy architectures that optimize for problems the company doesn’t have and often will never have. In theory to ensure stability and scalability. They are usually expensive and have nightmarish configuration complexity.
In practice complexity tends to lead to more outages and performance issues than if you had a much simpler (rented) bare metal setup with some spare capacity and better architecture design. More than half of serious outages I have seen documented in these reviews came from configuration mistakes or bugs in software that is supposed to manage your resources.
Nevermind that companies invest serious amounts of time in trying to manage complexity rather than remove it.
A few years ago I worked for a company that had two competing systems. One used AWS sparingly: just EC2, S3, RDS and load balancers. The other went berserk in the AWS candy shop and was this monstrosity that used 20-something different AWS services glued together by lambdas. This was touted as “the future”, and everyone who didn’t think it was a good idea was an idiot.
The simple solution cost about the same to run for a few thousand (business customers) as the complex one cost for ONE customer. The simple solution cost about 1/20 to develop. It also had about 1/2500 the latency on average because it wasn’t constantly enqueuing and dequeueing data through a slow SQS maze of queues.
And best of all: you could move the simpler solution to bare metal servers. In fact, we ran all the testing on clusters of 6 RPIs. The complex solution was stuck in AWS forever.
All aws is selling a web gui on top of free software. You still have to know ins and outs of the software to manage it properly.
Heck their support is shit too. I have talked to them to figure out an issue on their own in house software, they couldn’t help. My colleague happened to know what was wrong and fixed the issue with a switch of a checkbox.
Hetzner doesn't even have an RDS service. I've heard rumors for years but they haven't done it. Also, while I agree that leaning too much on the cloud leads to lock-in - this is an abstract concept that needs to be guarded against when managing technology, always, anyway - and vendor-driven hellish architectures, "vanilla cloud" offers other conveniences other than compute, bucket, storage managed and load balancers, like IAM, good CLIs, secrets management, etc. Only Scaleway or OVH seem to be timidly developing what I would consider "vanilla cloud".
when you compare IT stuff to cars, the discussion pivots to discussing cars, please think twice before using any analogies / comparisons with the physical world
I know that's not what you really meant, but as an unrelated tangent, modern cars are safer exactly because they're not built like tanks. The car crumpling up even at the smallest of crashes is good, because the more the car crumples, the less any of the impact is transferred to the passengers. It might mean the car is totaled and you need a new one, but that's better than someone in the car being totaled.
Yes, modern cars are superior when it comes to safety. But the daily experience is orthogonal to this since most people have serious accidents very infrequently. In your daily experience reliability and economy is more important.
And in computing, having a bit of downtime 1-2 times per year is often a price worth paying if avoiding it requires 90% more cost and effort. (Of course, people end up having downtime anyway because they have something so complex that they have 100x the number of ways something can fail).
Except 95% of companies have no need of ultra scalable super cloud.
If you are a very big SaaS company that is not Google or Apple, you are probably serving hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of unique users. AWS may be convenient, but you don't /need/ it, you can build an infrastructure that will handle such workload with any of the big european providers.
You'll just lose in comfort what you'll gain in data sovereignty and infrastructure costs.
I worked for a 7M€ MRR company that had maybe a million of users who used the software every day. The thing ran on a dozen of OVH servers, including multi-site redundancy.
Exactly. AWS proposition was much more alluring where compute was more expensive and it required yearly estimations and updates.
In times when one physical server can have 32, 64 or even 96 cores... you pack your own little datacenter right there and it's pretty cheap to simply overkill it, have one or two servers for redundancy and bye.
So many businesses will happily run from 4 core 10usd VPS (that would have been beefy server 20 years ago).
Scaleway (maybe upcloud as well) are also great and atleast Scaleway from what I know has many many features and its really competitive with the offerings it provides in general and has many offerings.
This is just my opinion, but there are some services that just package software as VM and let's you spawn it with a fancy button, leaving you with a largely unmanaged instance.
There are other services like S3, BigQuery or SQS that feels like magic.
It is easy to argue that it is expensive and complex. Since it is. And lots of people have made that argument. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone argue in favor of AWS while skimming the threads here.
So this is your opportunity to make the case for AWS.
It _used_ to be great and free tier made it easy enough to migrate most personal use cases to their infrastructure. But they have enshittified the free tier to a point where it’s unusable without forking over obscene amounts of money.
Plus their support is non-existent unless you are one of those big corps.
Plus for a 1T+ company. You would think that their infrastructure would be top tier, never go done, best practices?
Nope. us-east1 continues to be dogshit and their typical response is to fork over more money for multi region and zone support.
And yes, the scale at which aws advertises is largely overkill for many companies. Even some Fortune 500.
But technology is driven by clueless C-level executives that get easily impressed by deck presentations from aws marketing.
Instead of investing in workforce. They invest in cLoUd.
Hmm, how starnge that AWS then seems to be the most expensive option around. I've saved loads of money by using Hetzner instead. I can also easily move to other providers should I want thanks to open standards and open source.
Let politicians fight and die in their own wars. If russia "visited" my country, I'd follow it with a drink in my hand from the bahamas. No piece of dirt or earth is worth dying for, ever.
> No piece of dirt or earth is worth dying for, ever.
If no one ever defends the dirt, the pieces of earth where you can enjoy a drink in peace and freedom will shrink over time as the aggressors will continue to gobble up land because of the lack of defending.
They keep moving forward, you keep moving back, until you have no where to retreat to.
Come back to this comment in a few years and think about whether something significant has changed for those people who did not sacrifice their lives for a meaningless battle.
People are more important than the state. If they are not ready to defend him, why should they be forced? You can offer money or other valuables in return, such as fame, a pension, or a position, but if a person doesn't want to, why should they do it?
> Come back to this comment in a few years and think about whether something significant has changed for those people who did not sacrifice their lives for a meaningless battle.
My family is from Eastern Europe: if people had not fought "meaningless" battles then the land would have been ruled by genocidal maniacs. As it stand my grandmother almost ended up in an oven.
My very existence is the result of the battles having meaning, that people fighting matters.
At that time, the Genplan OST implied the almost complete extermination and the enslavement of a small number of the remaining people.
And also going back to the second part of the top commentary. At that time, people had a great motivation to defend their homeland and their loved ones. The survival of the country and the survival of the people in it were inextricably linked.
The current conflict has no such connection. The existence or cessation of the existence of the state is not related to the existence of people in it. Many of whom found life in a completely different country.
There were already volunteers, mercenaries, those who fell for a good salary. Why force those who actively avoid it?
Russia doesn't just "visit" your country. Lookup what Ruskiy Mir (Russian world) really means, basically your country gets subjugated by the Russians and I'm not talking about civilized or professional Russian forces - I'm talking about drunk and poor 20yo boys from a remote Russian villages that are now seeing the spoils of western civilization for the first time (do lookup what happened in Bucha, Kyiv suburbs in 2022 at the onset of invasion). Then of course the refusal of the Russians to recognize any other culture or language...the list goes on and on. So - yes, you could escape with a drink but then "If Not Me, Then Who"?
I did it. I grow organic market/CSA produce and provide opportunities for special needs individuals on the farm. I go to bed dog-tired, I make a fraction of what I would in software dev these days, but every single day is rewarding, and my resting heart rate is in the high 40s/low 50s without going to the gym. No jira tickets, no sleepless nights slamming caffeine during a sprint, no out of touch execs forcing me to enshittify, no more eye drops for excessive screen usage. I grow delicious food, support a wholesome local community, and feel like I'm making a positive contribution to society instead of pumping out CRUD apps and gamified bullshit like I was in tech.
I agree that farming is definitely romanticized in some tech circles, and it is not for everyone. Of course my tech experience wasn't universal, but even if ZIRP free money comes back to tech, I'll still be here tending my field :)
Farming is "easy" when you have your tech savings and the option to plunge back into a high earning career when shit goes sideways (with wise sage aura, cause you took care of some goats). Farming is harder when your entire family depends on you working hard and you have very little capital.
True. This is one of the best arguments for not having kids. I could never imagine putting myself in that uncertain situation. Much better to reduce those risks, and focus on yourself.
Having kids is a personal choice. The stress of having to support them is real and it might mean, at times, you sacrifice more than you would have without kids.
It's been entirely worth it for me and I cannot imagine my life without kids. But it's a deeply personal choice and I am not buying or selling the idea. I would just say nobody is ever ready and the fears around having them probably are more irrational than rational. But not wanting them because of how it might change your own life is a completely valid reason to not have kids.
> the fears around having them probably are more irrational than rational
My $0.02 is that if anything, the fears people have about how much their lives would be transformed are significantly lacking, and a lot of the "it's not so bad" advice is post-hoc rationalization. I mean, it's evolutionarily excellent that we humans choose to have kids, but it's very rational to be afraid and to postpone or even fully reject this on an individual basis. And as an industry and as a society, we should probably do a lot more to support parents of young children.
Ya, this is a fair callout. I moreso meant fears around being a bad parent. If anything, people experiencing those fears will be fine parents because they've got the consideration to already be thinking about doing a good job for their newly born.
This is the truth. I've been exposing 22 and 80 for decades, and nothing has happened. The ones I know who had something bad happen to them exposed proprietary services or security nightmares like wordpress.
And why would I bother with a home setup? Sure, for industrial IT go for it, VM:s and/or containers, but for my own personal stuff, baremetal, packages, and good old fashioned way is more than enough.
If you designed yourself into a corner by utilizing function as a service to program agains ta proprietary API, then you can just as well start from scratch or quit and join a company that knows how to avoid lock-in.
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